Yusif Sayigh (1916-2004) was a Palestinian nationalist, an Arab nationalist and one of the most influential exponents of Palestinian and Arab planning and development. He entered the national scene just after World War II as the primary organizer of a fund to raise money through taxes and tolls to buy up land threatened by Jewish purchase. Then, after a brief period as an Israeli prisoner of war (1948-1949), he took Syrian nationality, moved to Beirut where he met his wonderful wife, Rosemary, obtained a Ph.D.
Maxime Rodinson died on May 24, in Paris, at the age of 89. He was a contributing editor of this magazine from 1988 to 2000, and was honored for his pioneering work at MERIP’s fifteenth anniversary celebrations in Washington in 1986.
Mahfoud Bennoune died on May 17, succumbing finally to amyloidosis, an auto-immune disease he had battled since 1990. Mahfoud authored numerous pieces on colonial and post-colonial Algeria and Maghribi workers in Europe for Middle East Report (then MERIP Reports) beginning in the mid-1970s. He was selected as one of the first contributing editors of the magazine, in 1977, and served in that position for 15 years.
Abou El Fadl, Khaled et al. Islam and the Challenge of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Bird, Christiane. A Thousand Sighs, a Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004).
Bozarslan, Hamit. Violence in the Middle East: From Political Struggle to Self-Sacrifice (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004).
Johnson, Chalmers. The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).
Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, directed by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan (2003).
When a war breaks out people say, “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
— Albert Camus, The Plague
The photograph fetched from a back room in the narrow two-story house on the edge of Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp shows a precociously handsome adolescent, posing in a baseball cap and sports jacket against a faux backdrop of the Versailles palace gardens. A kaffiyya is tucked around his neck; his smile is mildly self-conscious. “He was 16 when they arrested him; his seventeenth birthday he spent in prison,” says Marwan’s older brother Maher as the picture is passed around. “He liked acting.”
From late 2000 to 2004, the most common form of Palestinian resistance to occupation has simply been getting there — refusing to allow Israeli checkpoints and sieges to shut down daily life. The unlikely symbols of that resistance are checkpoint workers — van drivers and porters — whose impromptu services allow other Palestinians to get there.
Rela Mazali, an Israeli writer and feminist peace activist, is a founder of New Profile, a group challenging the militarization of Israeli society and opposing the occupation. Joel Beinin, an editor of Middle East Report, spoke with her in Herzliya, Israel on January 6, 2004 and continued the conversation by e-mail in May 2004.
Your work with New Profile has focused on the relationship between gender and militarism in the context of the occupation. Can you tell us about the status of this relationship, and the historical evolution of feminist anti-occupation activism?
Samera remembers a time, during the tumultuous and violent years of the first intifada (1987-1993), when her Jerusalem was a place quite different than it is today. Though tens of thousands of Palestinians under Israeli occupation were imprisoned in those years, many of them tortured, a measure of hope and optimism pervaded Palestinian Jerusalem in ways that seem foreign to Samera and other Palestinian Jerusalemites in 2004, over three years into the costly, low-level warfare of the second uprising.
In January 2002, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who seized control of the Pakistani government in a 1999 military coup, delivered a major address to the nation—and to the world at large. Mindful of Pakistan’s designation by the global media as a crucial front in the US “war on terrorism,” Musharraf promised to curtail the activities of radical Islamist groups and to reform the curricula of the Islamic schools (madrassas) that had become infamous worldwide as incubators of the Taliban.
Brown, Nathan. Palestinian Politics After the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
Cook, Catherine, Adam Hanieh and Adah Kay. Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
Diamond, Larry, Marc F. Plattner and Daniel Brumberg, eds. Islam and Democracy in the Middle East (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, second edition, 1994).
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
What prompted you to found Hurriyyat Khassa, and what are its goals?
